Dying Offstage: Gender, Materiality, and Martyrdom in 1 Henry VI

Elizabeth Williamson

Abstract:

Despite the fact that Joan of Arc’s death was well-documented, 1 Henry VI withholds the spectacle of her execution—in large part, I think, because it would have been impossible to convincingly stage the act of burning someone at the stake. Like some of her fellow martyrs who had their tongues cut out in order to prevent them from testifying to their faith in their final moments, Joan is blocked from accessing the powerful combination of suffering and witnessing that male characters draw on in other parts of the cycle; the play is interested in staging her degradation, not her martyrdom.  

But where does that leave Joan: what is a martyr without the performance of martyrdom? Tricomi is puzzled by the contradictions between the Pucelle of Acts 1-4 and the Pucelle of Act 5; in an attempt to resolve this tension, he compares both unfavorably to that model of womanhood, the ever-patient Anne Askew. Such analyses elide the differences between theatrical representations and written martyrologies and attempt to impose a stable notion of identity on both. Following Bloom, Bosman and West, my essay tests out the claim that Joan’s flickering subjectivity “is productive rather than reflective or derivative” and that her absent martyrdom contributes to this productivity (169). At the same time, I will attempt to both honor and complicate Tricomi’s initial insight by suggesting some of the ways in which Askew’s hypervisibility (in Foxe’s text, especially) sheds light on the suppressed spectacle of Joan’s death.

Selected works cited:

Bloom, Gina, Anston Bosman, and William N. West. “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality, Or, How Performance Is History.” Theatre Journal 65, no. 2 (May 2013): 165–82.

Coles, Kimberly Anne. “The Death of the Author (and the Appropriation of the Text): The Case of Anne Askew’s Examination.” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 99, no. 4 (May 2002): 515–39.

Mazzola, Elizabeth. “Expert Witnesses and Secrete Subjects: Anne Askew’s Examinations and Renaissance Self-Incrimination.” In Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, edited by Carole Levin and Patricia Ann Sullivan, 157–72. SUNY Series in Speech Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Tricomi, Albert H. “Joan La Pucelle and the Inverted Saints Play in 1 Henry VI.” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 25, no. 2 (2001): 5–31.

Matters of Early Modern Kingship

My paper will begin at the meeting point between the ideal form of early modern kingship, as voiced in a text such as King James’ True Law of Free Monarchies in 1598, and its often imperfect reality as a subject of the world’s competing material forces. The tension between these two poles is a recurring theme on the early modern English stage, and the problem of reconciling the corruptibility of kingship as an essentially human station with its validation through divine terms forms the central action of many histories and tragedies: in Shakespeare's Richard II (1595), the ontology of monarchy finds expression as the precipitous difference between the “happy dream” of the divinely-insured throne and the “grim Necessity” (5.2) of de facto power that the deposed Richard expresses to his wife at their final parting; Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (1619) confronts its audiences with the victimization of an ardent “jure divino royalist” and a potent scene of regicide; Samuel Daniel's Philotas (1604) asks whether justice transcends the individual law and imperative of the monarch. Staging the complexity of early modern kingship was, it seems, an early modern commonplace: but where does the confrontation of ideologies that link worldly and divine power and the irreducible horizon of materiality leave belief? The unity between political and religious authority was well-articulated from the position of the individual subject (“rebel and atheist too,” says Donne in “Love’s Deity”); the dramatization of kingship as a fragmented, material, and historical phenomenon, however, seems to leave subsequent questions about the religious authority on which the king depends largely unasked. This paper will explore the tacit consequences of isolating kingship from its sources of theological authority and imagining it through the distinctly material processes of history and the stage.

Hugh Grady. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Francis Oakley. Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006.

James Phillips, “The Practicality of the Absolute: Justice and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Elizabethan Literary History 79, no.1 (2012): 161-177.

Richard McCoy. Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. 

Pierced Hearts in Early Modern English Theater

Thomas J. (T.J.) Moretti 

Abstract:

This paper argues that hearts and hands, when staged as materials imagined, quick, or dead, could concretize and concentrate the sacred in the early modern English theater in ways beyond what was possible at other venues. Whether Blackfriars, the Globe, the torture room, the pulpit, or the stake, early modern stages offered hearts and hands in ways that problematize the Protestant / Catholic divide and our understandings of religious discourses in early modern England more broadly. But in theaters especially, spectators could share senses of horror, loss, or doubt, could be moved toward the kind of shared affect sought from the pulpit, the stake, the communion table, and the altar. Foxe, Andrewes, Shakespeare, and Ford, for different venues and ends, showcased hearts and hands in ways that, with different levels of success, shepherded readers and theatergoers into temporary experiences of shared faith and community.  In so doing, certain playwrights, preachers, and martyrologists signaled post-Reformation efforts to move beyond suspect fantasies of religious materiality, to relocate religion within the material, and to sanctify fragmented materials of the body.  

Works Cited Preview:

Monta, Susannah. Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,         2005).

Rowe, Katherine. “God’s Handy Worke: Divine Complicity and the Anatomist’s Touch,” in David          Hillman and Carla Mazzio, ed., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corpeality in Early Modern           Europe (London: Routledge, 1997), 285-312.

Waldron, Jennifer, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (New          York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

Walsham, Alexandra, “Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early      Modern Europe,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.2 (Spring 2014): 241-280.

Williamson, Elizabeth. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington, VT:      Ashgate, 2009.

Bio:

I am Assistant Professor of English at Iona College and Editor of The Shakespeare Newsletter.  My scholarly interests include temporality and phenomenology in early modern English theater and the interplay between religion and gender in early modern English dramas.  My writings have focused on religious mediation and gender performance in such works as the Henry VI plays, John Webster’s The White Devil, and Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr.  My most recent article on hospitality and temporality in King Lear will appear in Julia Lupton and David Goldstein’s collection of essays, Shakespeare and Hospitality (Routledge).

"Timon of Athens and the Reformation Ethics of the Gift," George Moore

In an article illustrative of the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies, Ken Jackson presents Timon of Athens (1605-6) as a meditation on religious passion. Timon’s spiritual quest, Jackson argues, is figured forth in his hubristic desire to achieve the impossibility of true beneficence—to give gifts that miraculously escape the logic of exchange and reciprocity. Timon’s tragic nobility consists largely in this pursuit of selfless beneficence that none but Christ may truly achieve. Whereas Jackson reads Timon primarily through the lens of late Derridean philosophy, I rethink (and build upon) his argument by attending more closely to material experiences of the gift depicted in Timon, and, further, how such experiences undermine philosophies of gift-giving set out in Reformation theology.

As part of its overall attack on works-righteousness, the Reformation placed special emphasis on the need to forget oneself in the act of giving, to recognize oneself as merely a conduit through which divine beneficence flows in a larger cosmic cycle. I argue that Timon can never fully achieve this ethic of selfless giving because his beneficence is underwritten by usury agreements that memorialize his name. The second half of the play, however, juxtaposes such human dilemmas with a vision of nature as a true gift that appears without a demand for reciprocation. Through such contrasts, the play suggests that the rise of a credit economy alienates would-be givers from participating in larger ecological, cosmic, and divine cycles of beneficence.

Works Cited

Bailey, Amanda. “Timon of Athens, Forms of Payback, and the Genre of Debt.” English Literary Renaissance 41 (2011): 375-400.

Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift Exchange in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Jackson, Ken. “‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and the God of Timon of Athens.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001): 34-66.

Paul Yachnin--bio

Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies and former Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) at McGill University. He directed the Making Publics (MaPs) project (2005-10) and now directs the Early Modern Conversions project. Among his publications are the books, Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson) editions of Richard II (with Dawson) and The Tempest; and six edited books, including Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (with Bronwen Wilson) and Forms of Association (with Marlene Eberhart) His book-in-progress, Making Publics in Shakespeare’s Playhouse, is under contract with University of Edinburgh Press. His ideas and the ideas of his MaPs colleagues about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” A recent area of interest is higher education practice and policy, with publications in Policy Options and University Affairs and projects involving more than 25 Canadian universities.

Converting Froth

Conversion is movement under pressure. The Justice Escalus in Measure for Measure cautions the gentleman Froth not to frequent taverns. “Master Froth, I would not have you acquainted with tapsters: they will draw you, Master Froth”; and Froth himself allows that he never comes into any room in a taphouse but he is drawn in. This imagining of how a person can be transformed by the forces and procedures of a particular environment can stand as a comic model of how the play’s primary characters are subjected to forces external to themselves, or external to their idea of themselves, and how external pressure acts upon their mettle (both their character and material substance) by heating them, making them malleable, causing them to deviate away from who they thought they were and what they thought was their authentic life path.

In this paper, I focus on Measure for Measure and build on a paper presented last year at the SAA in order to think more deeply into the material,  corporeal, and ecological dimensions of forms of conversion in early modernity.